MSNBC Draws Connection Between ‘Racist’ French Candidate, Brexit, and Trump in Wake of Paris Shooting

MSNBC host Brian Williams and Daily Beast editor Christopher Dickey drew a connection on Thursday between President Donald Trump and a “racist” French presidential candidate.

As news was breaking of a deadly shooting on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, Williams and Dickey began talking about how the shooting could effect the upcoming French presidential election.

Dickey spoke about Marine Le Pen, president of the National Front party and a leading candidate in the French election.

“The most famous of them is Marine Le Pen, who is the head of a very far right party that will, believe me, will exploit this to the maximum if the shooter, the man who was shooting on the Champs-Élysées, turns out to have been an immigrant or the child of immigrants in any way, shape, or form, or a Muslim in any way, shape, or form,” Dickey said. “Because she is running a very anti-Muslim, very anti-immigrant campaign and always has.”

“Some would say it’s racist. Many people do say it’s racist,” Dickey continued. “But it certainly builds on the divisions that already exist in this society.”

Williams then tried to draw a connection between Le Pen, Trump, and the Brexit vote–Britain’s decision last year to leave the European Union.

“So her election would further spark that really started with Brexit, a spark that people looking at the global situation include the election of Donald Trump,” Williams said. “There are fears about Angela Merkel’s successor in Germany, but that would be a piece of this whole, correct?”

Dickey agreed, before calling two of the French candidates “extreme.”

“Both of those characters want to get essentially, get out of the European Union and also weaken NATO,” Dickey said. “They are very pro-Russian, and so if that sounds like an echo of things we’ve seen in the United states, and to some extent heard in Britain, it is, and it would be really the nails in the coffin of the European Union and very probably of NATO as well.”

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